Writers’ Licence

As a result of the Dovzhenko affair of 1944 and two campaigns against the ‘idealization’ of the Ukrainian past (1946-7), ideological control over the histori­cal genre in the republic was already tight The republic’s bureaucrats, censors, and critics subjected each new work to such scrutiny that Ukrainian writers often found it easier to publish in Moscow

In 1945 the central publisher Sovetskn pisatel released a Russian translation of St Petersburg Autumn by Oleksandr Ilchenko, a revised version of the author’s 1939 novel, The Heart Is Watting, which depicted Shevchenko’s life in the imperial capital during 1858-9 The 1945 version emphasized the poet’s contacts with Russian ‘revolutionary democrats’ and featured new scenes describing Shevchenko’s cordial meetings with their leading figure, Nikolai Chernyshevsky (In The Heart Is Waiting, Shevchenko and Chernyshevsky meet only briefly and purely by accident in a streetcar There is no documentary or memoir evidence that the two ever met) Over the next two years, the Russian translation of the book was reprinted twice The novel fit the post-war politics of memory so well that in August 1947 the KP(b)U Central Committee decided to investigate why the original Ukrainian text had never been published in the republic As it happened, Ilchenko did not submit the original text for publication until after the Moscow publisher had released the Russian translation in November 1946 and it had been favourably reviewed in the press Only then did Ilchenko give the Ukrainian version to Derzhhtvydav But with the campaign against the historical genre at its peak, this Ukrainian publisher did not hurry to print the novel, the success of the Russian edition notwithstanding The Central Committee ordered that St Petersburg Autumn, which ‘correctly presented [Shevchenko’s] friendship with prominent progressive Russian figures as well as his differences with Kuhsh,’ be published as soon as possible ⁷

The Ukrainian edition of St Petersburg Autumn appeared in late 1947 Because of Shevchenko’s importance as a national symbol, Ukrainian ideologues continued to reshape his biography in the following years to highlight the poet’s ties to Russian culture In 1951 Ilchenko completed another, even more pro-Russian, version of the novel, which then underwent extensive review in the apparatus of the Central Committee The text was released in 1952 as an updated edition ’⁸

After Kaganovich’s departure for Moscow, Ukrainian writers began pushing for the rehabilitation of the historical genre At the writers’ congress in 1948 Petro Panch called upon his colleagues to depict the Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Patriotic War and, ‘to some degree,’ Ukraine’s pre-revolutionary past He went on to explain ‘Let me stress this to some degree, our history [must be portrayed] as well I think such topics as the Ukrainian people’s War of Liberation, their reunification with the Russian people, and the patriotism [that has been] born in the common struggle of the Russians and Ukrainians against foreign encroach­ment on our lands should receive much wider coverage in Ukrainian literature ’⁹ Kocherha supported this appeal by recalling the success in 1946, against great odds, of his laroslav the Wise ¹⁰ Ideological bureaucrats did not rebuff the writers’ call, thus opening the door for the revival of the historical genre

Natan Rybak broke new ground with his epic novel, The Pereiaslav Council Although one could hardly find a more timely historical topic than Ukraine’s union with Russia, the press welcomed the novel rather reservedly In August 1947 Literaturna hazeta reacted with approval, albeit without enthusiasm, to the publi­cation of select chapters of the novel in a journal When a book edition appeared in late 1948 in a relatively modest print run of 20,000 copies, the same newspaper noted the publication but did not run a book review for several months¹¹

The novel presents an epic picture of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, ending with the Pereiaslav Council of 1654 Although Rybak combined several narrative lines featuring mam characters from various social strata, all developing the theme of Russian-Ukrainian friendship, his main emphasis was clearly the deeds of the Cossack leader Like many other positive historical characters in Stalinist litera­ture, Rybak’s Khmelnytsky appears as an ideal ruler imbued with traits similar to those of Stalin The hetman is an omnipresent and omnipotent father of the people who governs his state with an iron hand

Only a short time had passed, but he had accomplished much, and he had the right to credit himself with having done so The entire country was now divided into regiments and colonels elected in each regiment He had often had to suggest who should be elected, but these suggestions had been necessary He had had to dismiss those independent in thought \iaki myslyly svoieumno\ and slow in action, he had had to threaten some and exile others to the Crimea, ordering them to stay there until he recalled them Yet others he had removed in such a way that nobody knew what happened to them, and if anyone happened to mention them in conversation, Lavryn Kapusta [the head of the secret police] could only shrug his shoulders non committally¹²

Rybak’s Khmelnytsky is not a feudal lord, like the Stalin of post-war propaganda, he stands above all social strata, wisely guiding the Ukrainian nation in its entirety towards reunion with Muscovy, while at the same time expressing care and concern for the common people in periodic cleansings of the upper classes

More important, Rybak struck a fine balance between national history and class history by representing reunification as beneficial to both the Ukrainian nation as a whole and the Ukrainian toiling masses in particular When his vision so dictated, he did not hesitate to radically rewrite events The critics hailed Rybak’s treatment of the controversial Colonel Bohun, who had neither attended the Pereiaslav Council nor taken an oath to the tsar In his Fighters for Freedom, the pre-revolutionary nationalist novelist Adrian Kashchenko had portrayed Bohun as an opponent of the union with Russia In Bohun, the early Soviet Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Sokolovsky had depicted the colonel as a true representative of the tolling masses and the enemy of the feudal lord Khmelnytsky In Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Kornnchuk had chosen not to mention Bohun at all in his descrip­tion of the Pereiaslav Council and the subsequent events Rybak was the first writer to claim that Bohun had, in fact, always supported Khmelnytsky and had even taken an oath to the tsar ¹³

The first indication of the novel’s official acceptance came from Liubomyr Dmyterko, the secretary of the Writers Union, in his report to the writers’ congress in December 1949 After praising new novels on Soviet topics, he added ‘Together with the works on contemporary subjects - and I repeat, there are dozens of them - Natan Rybak’s weighty historical novel, The Pereiaslav Council, stands at the vanguard of Soviet Ukrainian prose ’ Dmyterko went on to approve of the topic and the style, as well as to read aloud extensively from the book’s description of the Pereiaslav Council The novel earned its author a Stalin Prize, Second Class ¹⁴

In marking new limits for what was permissible and warranted official approval, the plots of two historical plays, both completed in 1949, highlight the new politics of memory Leonid Smilainsky’s drama Sahaidachny attempted to recast this Cossack leader as an early promoter of union with Russia However, it was no mean task Although Sahaidachny had sent a friendly embassy to the tsar in 1619 or 1620, he had also participated in the Polish army’s march on Moscow in the previous year The KP(b)U Central Committee’s expert felt that even passing references to the war with Russia were inappropriate and that the entire last scene, in which Sahaidachny dies with the words ‘Bells, bells’ on his lips, was ambiguous ‘Is he referring to the bells greeting the Cossack envoy in Moscow or to the bells sounding the alarm when Sahaidachny together with the Polish prince invaded Russian territory''’¹⁵

Although Smilansky revised the drama, renaming it Rus' is Rus’ and adding an epigraph from the 1943 manifesto that listed Sahaidachny among progressive historical figures, the Ukrainian Agitprop withheld its approval¹⁶ The imperial project of memory required that all mention of the military clash between the Cossacks and the Muscovites some thirty-five years before their ‘reunification’ be suppressed Accordingly, there was no longer a place for Hetman Sahaidachny on the list of Soviet Ukrainians’ ‘great ancestors ’

In contrast, Liubomyr Dmyterko’s Together Forever passed the censors with flying colours The play depicts events in Ukraine after Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s death (1657), when Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky attempted to break with Muscovy Dmyterko discredits Vyhovsky and his followers, who are cast as lacking mass support and who are opposed in the play by the pro-Russian Cossack leaders, including Ivan Sirko, Martyn Pushkar, and Khmelnytsky’s widow, Hanna First published in June 1949, the play immediately earned good reviews, and the Sumy Drama Company staged it as early as November 1949 When Kharkiv’s Shevchenko Theatre, Ukraine’s leading drama company during the post-war decade, first performed Together Forever in February 1950, the press hailed the premiere as a success of national significance ¹⁷ In contrast to Kornnchuk’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky, however, Dmyterko’s play had a considerably shorter theatrical run Staged by practically all Ukrainian companies in 1950, by 1952 it was no longer being produced in Kiev, Kharkiv, or Lviv Contemporary theatre critics attributed the quick decline of interest in the play to its low artistic quality, namely, its lack of developed and vivid positive characters ¹⁸

Meanwhile, although they were less attuned to the most recent ideological winds, Kocherha’s laroslav the Wise and Kornnchuk’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky re­mained the mainstays of Ukrainian repertoire Three and a half years after its premiere, in June 1950 the Kharkiv company took laroslav to Kiev on a highly successful tour Kornnchuk’s play survived, overcoming one hurdle after another After the war, the influential playwright revised Bohdan to eliminate the work’s anti-Pohsh animus by changing ‘the Poles’ to ‘the gentry’ throughout In 1951, when Pravda criticized Kornnchuk’s libretto of the opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky, some companies suspended productions of the play, but they promptly renewed its staging after the success of the opera’s second redaction in 1953 ¹⁹ Aside from the different artistic qualities of the three plays, their celebration of the great ancestors might be the key to the popularity of the optimistic Bohdan and Yaroslav, just as its blackening of separatist historical figures might explain the audiences’ tepid enthusiasm for the more negative Together

In early 1952 Ukrainian functionaries and writers already were thinking about the preparation of new literary works to celebrate the tercentenary A conference at a major publishing house, Radianskyi pysmennyk, called upon litterateurs to compose new paeans to the ‘age-old friendship’ with Russia The Writers’ Union proposed that the leading poets be mobilized to create a monumental collective ode to said friendship ²⁰

Too much should not be attributed to such ‘planning,’ since the two major historical novels published in 1953-4 had been in process long before the authori­ties issued an appeal for them The topicality of Pereiaslav enabled two authors to revive Cossack glory as a major component of the Ukrainian national memory Petro Panch revised his 1946 novel, The Zaporozhians, adding two more parts and publishing the resulting bulky volume under the title Ukraine Was Humming Only later did Ukrainian ideologues notice that Panch ‘had not properly elimi­nated’ the mistakes for which the party had denounced The Zaporozhians in 1947 The publication ofvolume 2 of Rybak’s The Pereiaslav Council was the major event in Ukrainian literary life in 1953 Contemporary critics agreed that the sequel was artistically superior to the original, even though Rybak had further developed elements of adventure, intrigue, and espionage not considered proper in a serious historical novel ²¹

The tercentenary celebrations marked the culmination of the historical genre’s rehabilitation As the best novel embodying the new official memory, The Pereiaslav Council was elevated to the near-sacred status of a work that authorities exhorted the populace to ‘study’ (not unlike the Communist Manifesto or the Short Course of the party history) Between January and May 1954 all Ukrainian provinces report­ed the organization of public readings, readers’ conferences, study workshops, and amateur dramatizations of the novel In Stanyslaviv province alone, more than a hundred readers’ conferences took place The village of Vbvkovyi in Rivne prov­ince, where a readers’ conference with 190 participants was preceded by a lecture, ‘The Pereiaslav Council and Its Historical Importance,’ and followed by the screening of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, could serve as a typical example ²²

The Pereiaslav Council went through several mass editions during 1953—4, including a luxurious Ukrainian two-volume set with colour illustrations by A Riznychenko Three Moscow publishers planned to issue a Russian translation of the novel in 1954, causing the KPSS Central Committee to intervene and decide that the jubilee edition would be printed by Goshtizdat As if all this propaganda were not enough, Ukrainian radio broadcast readings of the novel, chapter by chapter, and dramatized selected fragments in a kind of historical soap opera ⁹

Following in Rybak’s footsteps, many other writers speedily produced novels about the Ukrainian, mostly Cossack, past that emphasized Russian help and the Ukrainians’ age-old desire to unite with their Russian brethren These works included Ivan Le’s Sworn Brothers and the second variant of Nalyvaiko, lakiv Kachura’s Ivan Bohun, Vasyl Kucher’s Ustym Karmaliuk, and lurii Mushketyk’s Semen Pain ²⁴ Dmyterko produced a new version of Together Forever, which many theatres staged in time for the tercentenary celebrations Other companies chose to renew Kornnchuk’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which was also included, together with Rybak’s novel, in the school curriculum for senior grades ²⁵

Significantly, intellectuals again began including Kievan Rus' into their notion of Ukrainian national memory In January 1954 the Zankovetska Drama Com­pany (Lviv) for the first time in Soviet theatre history staged Ivan Franko’s mystic drama The Dream of Prince Sviatoslav (1895), substituting the voice of the common people’ for that of the ghost in the original As early as 1945 some Ukrainian intellectuals had proposed the production of this patriotic play, but the Zhdanovshchtna had curtailed their plans Now, however, the Lviv intelligentsia managed to bring off a production of this pre-Soviet Ukrainian interpretation of the Kievan heritage Following Lviv’s lead, many other companies produced the pl ly²⁶ During this time, the writer Semen Skharenko began working on the first post-war Ukrainian novel about Kievan Rus' According to his 1953 report to the Writers’ Union, Skliarenko was composing the novel ‘The Great Rus” - the first stage of a project that would eventually result in two best-selling historical novels in the Thaw period, Sviatoslav (1957) and Volodymyr (1963) ²⁷

The Ukrainian writers had so successfully recovered from the official purge of the historical genre in 1946-7 that in May 1954 Moscow’s Institute of World Literature convened a special conference on the Ukrainian historical novel At the Third Congress of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union in October 1954 nobody felt it necessary to defend the historical genre Mykola Bazhan, head of the organization, praised the recent works of Rybak, Panch, Le, and others as Soviet Ukrainian prose’s most notable accomplishments, declaring, ‘The important role of contem­porary subjects for the successful development of Socialist Realism in literature does not at all diminish the significance of historical subjects ’²⁸

Despite the party’s ideological supervision, writers were still able to mount a subtle but effective defence of the historical genre Regimenting the public’s perception of their books was beyond even the Communist Party’s capabilities

The numerous letters from readers, which can be found in Natan Rybak’s personal archive, allow an insight into how the post-war public perceived his novel Reactions varied from a sentiment expressed in an anonymous note, which claimed that reading the epic narrative of the Cossacks’ heroic deeds and resulting incorporation into Russia ‘left a sense of both elevated pride and burning bitter­ness in the heart,’ to lengthy tirades that seemed to confirm the novel’s desired educational impact Petro Zhytnyk, from the village of Mykolaivka of Nekh- voroshcha district in Poltava province, wrote to Rybak on 27 February 1952

The history of Ukraine and, in particular, the life and activities of the great statesman Bohdan Khmelnytsky have been of interest to me since childhood Under the influence of Kuhsh’s Black Council, I had formed wrong conceptions about Ukrainian history and Hetman Khmelnytsky’s role, and I was not able to free myself from those ideas for a long time Much later, in 1943, having read O Kornnchuks play Bohdan Khmelnytsky, watched the film of the same name, and having read your novel The Pereiaslav Council for the first time in 1949, I finally understood with profundity the age of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, his services in liberating Ukraine from foreign oppres sion and uniting it with Russia These wonderful works allowed me, a common citizen, to see the great truth'²⁹

Ideologically correct as it is, the letter reveals that this reader was not interested in the notions of the friendship of peoples, class struggle, and the fraternal aid of the Russian elder brother so dear to Soviet ideologues’ hearts and sown so abundantly throughout the novel Instead, Zhytnyk understood the great hero Khmelnytsky as a historical agent who had liberated Ukraine and brought it to its beneficial union with Muscovy

Other Ukrainian readers also perceived The Pereiaslav Council as simply a work glorifying their nation’s heroic past, as if the ‘friendship of peoples’ paradigm never existed Ivan Burlaka, from the village of Erazmivka in Oleksandnvka district in Kirovohrad province, wrote to Rybak in December 1950 ‘Khmelnytsky, the Cossack leader and the liberator of all Ukrainian people, is shown so forcefully It is a truly patriotic book that explains the state-building aims and humane ideals of the heroic Ukrainian people s national hberational movement ’³⁰

Most striking is the number of letters Rybak received from ethnic Ukrainians living in other Soviet republics All his correspondents from Kuban, Sverdlovsk province, and Georgia wrote of their Ukrainian or even Cossack roots with pride and complained about the difficulties in obtaining Ukrainian historical novels in Russia Dmytro Krykun in Kuban informed the writer that the local bookstore had sold out its allotment of The Pereiaslav Council in a week Krykun considered himself lucky to have procured a book in a second-hand shop, although only volume 1 was available, at least it was in Ukrainian ³¹

Having read the first volume in Russian translation, Colonel Hryhoni Bludenko, who was stationed in Bukhta Olga in the Primore region in the Russian Far East, wrote to Rybak in May 1951 ‘I am sure that your Pereiaslav Council reads much better in Ukrainian I am serving here on the Pacific Ocean among many other Ukrainians who do not want to ever forget their people, their language, and their glorious ancestors, such as Bohdan Khmelnytsky ’³²

The readers could apparently interpret selectively even the most ideologically correct historical novel, overlooking its descriptions of class struggle and friend­ship with Russia and reading it instead as a fascinating account of their ancestors’ glorious past Imbibing a Ukrainian historical novel did not always mean swallow­ing wholesale a text ideologically sweetened with the right measures of class and national history, both modified by the doctrine of Russian guidance For many, reading such a work was a heady act of discovering or reaffirming their national identity